Contact centers are commonly used by organizations to provide customer support information or information to potential customers or consumers. In a typical arrangement, a customer will initiate a contact or communication by dialing a telephone number associated with the organization from which the customer desires information. The call may then be routed to particular support groups within the organization based on information entered by the user. For example, the user may respond to prompts to make selections that assist the organization in routing the call to a group that is capable of effectively responding to the customer's inquiry. Routing may also be accomplished by providing particular telephone numbers or other contact addresses based on the nature of the customer's inquiry.
Once a customer contact has been routed to an organization or to a group within an organization, that contact is directed to an agent or other resource that is determined to be capable of handling the inquiry. For example, agents may be grouped according to their skills and/or areas of expertise, and assigned to handle inquiries that are determined to be within the capabilities of those agents. In a typical contact center, customer inquiries are placed in queues if an agent deemed capable of responding to the inquiry is not currently available. Agents are then assigned to queued inquiries as agents become available.
If a customer or other contact initiator has a particular problem or is in need of a particular piece of information, it can be more efficient for the contact initiator to establish communications with a party having the specialized knowledge required to handle the inquiry directly, rather than attempting to reach such a person through normal routing procedures. However, such direct routing requires that the contact initiator have a phone number, e-mail address or other contact address associated with the correct agent or resource. However, contact centers typically do not provide an efficient means for providing or discovering such information. This is because the formal menu structures that are typically used for routing contacts are by nature inflexible and are not well-suited to routing inquiries concerning atypical or non-supported requests. Indeed, in a typical scenario, contact information identifying an expert with respect to a particular field of inquiry is usually obtained through informal processes, such as recognition of a need for routing a call to a particular agent by another agent that has been placed in communication with the contact initiator through normal routing procedures. Accordingly, reaching an appropriate resource can be a time-consuming and frustrating process for a contact initiator.